Last Labour Day weekend, Patricia “Trish” Huber was driving along Georgian Bay near Owen Sound, Ont. Formerly in real estate, the taxi driver and Salvation Army community driver had gone out to scout available property for her eldest daughter.

Right after lunch, she was heading home to Wiarton, Ont., when she stopped for an ice cream cone.

Ten minutes from her house, she suddenly started feeling sick, sweaty and dizzy.

I better get going, she thought to herself, and backed her car onto the road.

That was the last thing she remembered before she blacked out.“

Just Hold On

”When Trish came to, “I thought I was in a movie set. That’s where my mind was at.”

Her vehicle had slid down to the bottom of a cliff, facing up.

“I was looking up at rocks in front of me, Georgian Bay was behind me, and people were at the top yelling down, ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’ ” Trish recalls.

“Where am I and how did I get here?” she called back.

“Just hold on, the ambulance is coming,” the crowd called down to her.

Long Trek Back

When firefighter MaryAnn Brown, a lieutenant at Wiarton Station 30 of the Town of South Bruce Peninsula Fire Department, arrived on the scene with her crew a short time after, what she saw confounded her.

The car had careered off the road toward Georgian Bay through a gap in the forest, and it had ended up with its front facing upward and its back against a tree, which held it from dropping into the bay.

Trish was seated in her car on an angle, uninjured, so the airbags had not hit her when they deployed.

Lieutenant MaryAnn was the first one down to the scene.

“When the call came in that a woman had driven over an embankment, we were trying to strategize how we were going to deal with this,” Lieutenant MaryAnn recalls. “We expected the worst, but when we finally arrived on scene, we couldn’t believe what we saw.”

The front of the car was entirely undamaged. It was almost as if Trish had backed down into the tree.

The emergency team lowered a ladder and checked Trish’s vitals. From there, they got her out of the vehicle and put her on a stretcher. Instead of going straight back up the ladder, the team took the long way around the escarpment. It was a longer hike but less strenuous than a straight climb back would have been.

“There’s only one being I can thank, especially after something like that,” she says. “And that’s God.” PATRICIA HUBER

“One Miracle After Another”

“I wasn’t scared at all,” Trish says of her coming to when the team reached her. “I was miffed! How did I get here? I wasn’t fearful. I wasn’t injured. I was fine.”

“She was a good sport,” smiles Lieutenant MaryAnn. “She didn’t give us any grief.”

Brought to the hospital, the doctors checked her out and released her after a couple of hours of observation with nothing to show for her ordeal but a few bruised ribs.

What shocks Trish is that she did not wake up throughout the entire incident.

“I felt as if I wasn’t in the car,” she says. “God took me out of that car, because it’s an impossibility to have survived that without any injuries. That’s the thing. I keep going over it in my head, and it completely baffles me.”

Lieutenant MaryAnn agrees.

“I remember saying to her when she was still sitting in the car, ‘Girl, you had some guardian angels with you today.’

“Even looking at where she went in, that spot in particular,” Lieutenant MaryAnn continues, “there were guardrails on each side of the location. How she managed to go where she went through and up over that ledge, and how the car landed, is still ... you have to scratch your head about it.”

“There was no damage to the front of my car,” Trish marvels. “I went through a forest, didn’t hit any trees, went up a tree, apparently, and the tree just cradled me down to the ground? How could my car fall 30 feet, settling on its wheels facing the opposite way I went in?”

The only reason rescue vehicles were on their way so promptly was because a concerned motorist, Josh Beaton, out of the corner of his eye, had seen Trish’s car speed up and go over the embankment.

In that split second, a life was saved.

“If it wasn’t for him taking the time to follow me, stand on the cliff making sure I was awake and calling the ambulance, I might still be there,” Trish declares. “Josh was a big part of the story, the hero really!

“It was one miracle after another.”

Living Proof

The doctors later deduced that Trish had been given an overdose of a blood pressure medication another doctor had inadvertently prescribed.

“As a firefighter, you deal with sad things,” Lieutenant MaryAnn says. “We expected the worst. Instead, we found the best result imaginable.”

Taia Anderson-McLeod, a caseworker who works with Trish at The Salvation Army Wiarton Community Church, says, “The experience brought her closer to knowing the living God who was clearly watching over her.”

Trish attends Salvation Army services regularly as well as Bible study.

“There’s only one being I can thank, especially after something like that,” she says. “And that’s God.

“I hope this story inspires people to realize that miracles happen every day, and I am living proof.”